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Ebbsfleet Garden City: the landscape architecture will be calm, lush and green

‘Fresh calm lush green designer landscapes beckon you to lead a harmonious lifestyle at the garden city. The Garden City is a beautiful development, a delightful combination of three buildings, Almond, Jasmin and Mandarin. Nestled in a picturesque surrounding comprised of tree-, fruits- and flower-lined avenues The beauty and the grace of each flower type exude great confidence and reflect the true essence and exquisite quality of the tree, fruit and flower types after which they are named.’
I’ve solved the problem of why George Osborne envisages Ebbsfleet as a Garden City: he’s been to Dubai and seen the Ajman Garden City. He loved it with the adoration of a puppy. He wants Sunny Ebbsfeet to rival Dubai with its wonderful expanses of lawns embellished with wonderful expanses of charming roads and concrete slabs. The only features Ebbsfeet cannot rival are the intense heat, dust, glare and humidity. Never mind, the Chancellor can tell our state-owned banks to give starter loans for tanning parlours and tatoo artists. The UK economy will then boom with a slew of professional opportunities in skin cancer.
Please tell me it’s a spoof. The world cannot have clients fool-enough to build such a “”””Garden City””””. It cannot have designers bad-enough to produce the drawings. It cannot have buyers rich-enough to buy the property. But listen carefully: the voiceover is spoken in a near-human English marketing argot – but for the robot saying al-mond, insetad of aa-mond. So the Dubai video IS a prank by Gravesend kids doing robotics as a sixth form project. Ebbsfleet Garden City will, after all, be a place of semi-detached rose arbours where we can all enjoy harmonious lush green lifestyles.
Phew. What a relief.
See also Will Ebbsfleet be a Garden City a New Town or an overblown Housing Estate?

It is a big topic. Not only is it necessary to tackle differences in dealing with climate and translating this to an increased building scale [ http://catnaps.org/islamic/islaurb1.html ], but there are also radical differences in public/private life from western concepts that need to be understood.

John Lockerbie’s article is excellent and it is surprising that it appears as a webpage – rather than the book it deserves to be. Describing the past and criticizing the present is easier than point to a way forward. But one policy which should have been applied to most of Asia’s old cities is easily described: they should have been preserved. And they should still be preserved. The Chinese plan for ‘modernizing’ the old centre of Kashgar is seen, as anti-Muslim and anti-Uighar but, in reality, it is typical of almost all Asian cities.
Re the Gulf, it is easy to understand that living in air-conditioned apartment and traveling in an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned shopping centre has more appeal than walking on a hot humid dusty street to hot humid dusty shop.

The Institut du Monde Arabe has an interesting elevation and produces an appealing internal environment. But there is nothing Arab and little that is appealing about the external space it helps define and create.
I have been looking at the urban history of London’s Whitehall over the last 1000 years. It has evolved slowly, in the English way, and what survives is both surprisingly large and surprisingly small. But for the fire in 1691 I guess they would have kept the old Whitehall Palace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_Whitehall

What the Institut du Monde does well (remembering it is in Paris rather than an Arabic country) is use a shading device on the elevation to moderate the amount of light entering the building and the degree of transparency. Nouvel has used a geometric and operable motif based on Arabic culture to achieve this end. [ http://blog.kineticarchitecture.net/2011/01/arab-world-institute/ ] The interior directly benefits from this approach in creating an unusual degree of enclosure typical of the lattice.

My sense is that this approach could be used in a closely spaced Arabic urban environment both for climate control, privacy and moderating degrees of enclosure. I am sure that landscape architects could easily imagine a complementary appropriate response to the external urban environment which could blur into varying degrees of separation and integration.

Oh yes. The streets could be shaded with buildings or trees. But without the public transport which can only function at high urban densities it is necessary for rich people to have a high level of car access to their dwellings.
Re the Institute du Monde Arab, wouldn’t they have obtained a better degree of solar protection if they had used brise-soleil instead of internal shading?

I can see that living in London’s Olympic “Village” will be very attractive for some sections of the population. The development has much which can appeal to the age group for which it was designed: youngish, healthy, affluent, wanting exercise, liking views, enjoying restaurants etc. But calling the place a ‘village’ is preposterous and the ‘park path’ shown in the photograph could serve as London’s fourth airport.
There is a lingering hatred of ‘tower blocks’ in London because they were built as ‘social housing’ for the urban poor. This is what lies behind Auberon Waugh’s advice that ‘If you meet anyone in a pub or at a party who says he is an architect, punch him in the face’ (the Waugh family are remembered for their verbal pugilism but not for their feminist sympathies!).

Perhaps the problem here is that the requirements of an Olympic event with the need for temporary accommodation for athletes focused on performing sporting feats to an elite level are vastly different to residential requirements in an inner urban environment. Perhaps they are more similar to students living on a university campus?

Auberon Waugh, like his father, was a specialist in insults. Evelyn heard that doctors had removed a benign tumour from Randolph Churchill (Winston’s father), and said it was a typical triumph of modern science to take out the only part of him that wasn’t malignant. Auberon was kind to his family and was probably kinder to women than men. Not sure.
Good idea for the Olympic ‘Village’. It would also be well suited to a police HQ.

Given current land values and property prices in London I guess only the very rich will be able to afford gardens (or even access to gardens) there in future unless they are designated as public parks and funded by the taxpayer. A better policy would be to construct new, attractive, cities well away from the South East if the population of this country is going to expand by another 10-20 million people.http://www.cityam.com/221125/population-growth-uk-become-biggest-country-european-union-2050